This year the BlogHer Conference, that is being billed as a “Selfiebration,” returns to the place it all began 10 years ago in San Jose – Silicon Valley.

So between now and the start of the conference I will be posting about various aspects of my journey with BlogHer since I joined the online community in late 2005 or early 2006.

Back when I first traveled to California in the 70s I think I heard people refer to it as The South Bay. This was before Silicon Valley. Things change. My blogging certainly has changed through time. I started out as a pop culture demographic blogger in my first bloggy incarnation:

Wayback Machine capture of Late-boomers.com from 2001.

My goal way back then, 2001 and before, was to get the notion of the quite distinct groups within the Baby Boomer Generation differentiated into cohorts. I could find no one else using the term “Late Boomer” back then, so my relentless elists, newsletter and website posts at the turn of the millennium were about my cohort, which I termed Late-Boomers, who were the last half of the children born during what was called the post-WWII baby boom. I succeeded.

Back in 2007 I still used pseudonyms on the internet. Dependent upon the site, topic, and time, I was either thewordwench, cuppakona, pinktucson, or artpax, unless I was in the virtual world of Second Life® where I was Ana Herzog. The first post I can find that I made on BlogHer.com was made as artpax: I had started seriously questioning the utility of pseudonyms, and I was rapidly beginning to think that attempts at anonymity were silly. But a lot of bloggers I met at my first BlogHer conference were attending the conference anonymously too. I haven’t noticed that as much at more recent BlogHer events.

(It was not the first BlogHer conference that I tried to attend – I had volunteered to do podcasting at the 2006 conference before my Hubby had a hissy fit and I had to bail. Boy oh boy, that was a year full of stories – that I have as yet to tell.)

I billed myself as a political blogger at the time. I’d already run afoul of media squelching my stories. Huff Po would not allow any links to my blog due to profanity, or so they said. But I suspect that fascistic trolls has complained about blog and they banned links without even checking. I reported on stories back then that no one else was covering. The following pics and snippet of text is mine:

Even back then I was outside the Mommy Blogger mainstream, and truth be told I was a bit sad that I was, as always, outside the in-group. I should have tried to tag along with Anne-Marie, my wonderful roomie, of This Mama Cooks fame to meet some of her Foodie and Silicon Valley Moms friends. But instead I went to the parties alone and met some nice people, but didn’t really connect with anyone else. I was not able to book a room in the main conference hotel. I had just spent the last 5 months in Northeastern Indiana caring for my elderly mother and then emptying out her home after her death in late June.

Truth be told, I was a bit shell shocked; I knew I needed to attend this conference. I needed – far more than I knew -– to surround myself with smart, vital women’s energy, and there was so much of it there on Navy Pier. It lifted me up and carried me along until I could land back in my Tucson life and home and begin my non-political writing phase. That did not go very well. I did not give up my political blog until 20011.

My goal there was to help people understand that nearly all women want peace, that we had been lied to by war criminals, and that if we work together we can make our voices heard, even when the media will not cover it. I blogged, and some of the things I did (such as CODEPINK in SecondLife) were parodied on The Daily Show.

CODEPINK SL was pretty much myself along with a great supportive guy in Venice Beach, CA. I, in my Ana Herzog avatar, had disrupted military presentations in SL, and protested Newt Gingrich when he spoke on Virtual Capital Hill, and participated in anti-G8 European-organized rallies. I blogged about these adventures at: VIRTUAL PINK – CODEPINK IN THE METAVERSE. Again, I think I met some of my goals. But goals change.

The goals that began evolving at that first conference attendance at BlogHer 2007 gradually replaced many of the goals of my second blogging incarnation.

I never bought into being a vehicle for corporate porridge-sales or relentless pursuit of the pageview, but I learned that I knew a ton about marketing and that contemporary marketing was using all the suggested practices for implementation of the theory I studied decades ago when semiotic methodology was first being introduced to students beyond Departments of Philosophy. Women and our words on the internet were going to change everything. Welcome to my third bloggy incarnation. It has had some shifts, and fits and starts along the way but being a part of a womens’ voice being heard globally underlies all I do in my writing world.

I found a great article this morning! Turns out the early boomers, at least some of them,feel they too were misclassified. I’m primarily interested in the description of musicians who were not boomers being used as iconographic images of the Baby Boom. Most of the musicians associated with the Hippie, free love, free sex, anti-establishment movement in the early days of the Hippie Movement were from the Silent Generation. Yep, it is true – most were born during the war or were pre-war, late Depression era babies. All music “of a generation” tends to be created by folks a bit older than themselves. No surprise there when you stop to think about it. But it is a fact that is often left out of analysis about cohorts that who and what comprises the music of a cohort and the music by a cohort are rarely if ever the same set of music and musicians. The article touches on many other tangents of interest to Late Boomers and anyone perplexed by the steady stream of misinformation that has proliferated since at least the early 1960s about who and what the Late Boomers and thus the Boomers too really are.

Without further ado, here is a reprint of the article.

___________________

Aging Baby Boomers Myths vs. Needed Gov’t Elder Policies

Ijust received a post card from Russell Sage, a Troy, New York women’s college, about the upcoming 40th reunion for our overly written about Class of 1968. In early November 2007, Amazon.com had almost 18,000 (17,810) books with references to Baby Boomers more than four times as many as for Gen Y (4, 236) or Gen X (3,916) and many more than for the “Silent” Generation (1,158).

As a marketing researcher, I keep up with such generation information with its often-disconcerting stereotypes and myths. Did all Boomers really act out with sex and drugs at big rock festivals? Even worse, should we all be branded technophobes as in Bill Hendrick’s February 22, 2005 Cox News Service article “High tech intimidates many baby boomers as they move into midlife?” Never mind that Mr. Hendrick’s Simmons Market Research Bureau study of 28,000 adults showed their “tech-shy” segment rose only from 36% among those under 40 to 43% for those 40 and over.

I saw how I too had been influenced by Boomer media myths October 30, 2007 during the 1967 portion of an XM Satellite radio “IT: The History of Pop Music”. In the middle of its “Summer of Love Motown Magic,” XM-6 included a news reminder of that year’s nationwide race riots. My Internet search discovered Detroit riots that summer of 1967 precipitated Motown’s later move to Los Angeles and that was the year most Connecticut county seat cities experienced their late 1960’s riots. So there I was spinning the “16 Big Hits Volume 5–The Motown Sound” album in my parents’ one-acre eight room Hamden, Connecticut home while riots shattered the economic spine in nearby New Haven where I live now. I now schlep out to Hamden and other suburban malls even for doctors’ appointments where I notice inner city bus riders’ risky walks across vast thoroughfares, green buffers and parking lots to their Wal-Mart and fast food jobs.

The Monkees’ kvetching about the comforts of our “Pleasant Valley Sunday” suburbs brought back my after graduation plans for a charming old brownstone Manhattan apartment or one in a modern high rise like my cousin’s. Then again, my Upper West Side brownstone lacked heat between nine and five despite calls to the City’s complaint line and I have struggled for years in tiny Le Corbusier “Radiant City Towers” kitchens including the one my cousin passed onto me. I also so wish we could burn charcoal for just one more family gathering in that big comfy home my mother just sold.

When I wasn’t thinking of leaving “Pleasant Valley” for Manhattan that “Summer of Love”, I was envying affluent peers’ joining Scott McKenzie’s gentle people in San Francisco while I waitressed at Friendly’s. Yet PBS’s April 23, 2007 “American Experience: Summer of Love” shows as many run-away ragged young teens as sophisticated collegians. At the Monterey Pop Festival, they would have more been jolted by the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, Canned Heat, Jimi Hendrix, The Who and Eric Burdon than mellowed out Simon and Garfunkle and The Mamas and Papas.

Nor would my fellow Boomers have seen many rockers their age at rock or folk concerts in San Francisco or anywhere else for that matter. Only one Boomer, The Who’s late Keith Moon, was in the 1968 Film “Monterey Pop.” Throughout 1967, only thirteen other Boomers were rock stars–Stevie Wonder, Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees, Peter Noon of Herman’s Hermits, Howard Kaylan of the Turtles, John Hayward of the Moody Blues, Jim Messina of the Buffalo Springfield, Tommy James, Janis Ian, Donovan, Arlo Guthrie, LuLu, Robert Hall Weir of the Grateful Dead and Leslie Gore “blast from the past. “Wikipedia’s” well-documented birth dates reveal most 60’s rockers and folkies were pre-1946 “Silent” Generation members as were anti-war and feminist movement leaders.

Later that day, after Boomer Linda Ronstadt’s 1968 feminist anthem “Different Drum,” my computer’s freeze returned me to present realities. I have more worries about my future than Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin in “The Graduate” of that year.

One worry is how Baby Boomer myths affect government and other policymakers. Will they or anyone for that matter seek representative sample research and accurately report its information for decisions about us Boomers? For example, will prospective employers’ beliefs that we cannot learn computer programs shut out Boomers who continue working to offset pension losses? Turning around statistics in the previously mentioned 2005 Simmons Market Research Bureau Study, a majority of us, 57%, are not “tech-shy.” Conversely, will federal administrators for a senior job program at which I sought a part-time cash flow continue to see Boomer seniors with our expensive academic and technical training as qualifying only for minimum wage unskilled jobs? I was sent for a file clerk position at a home care agency when I wrote a marketing audit and plan for a similar agency earlier in my career. The Census American Community Study’s age and income statistics for Boomers of 2001—then 35-54—show 59% have had some type of formal post-high school education compared to 43% for those 55 and over. Those statistics would not have counted in all the continuing ed computer programs courses I’ve taken with other Boomers.

While our income security decreases, gentrification in many central cities and inner–ring suburbs keeps increasing Boomer property taxes and rents along with increased health care costs. Will politicians continue to focus on tax and other incentives to developers of luxury units in rural 55+ enclaves where many of us will to be driven about at some point or in this century’s first city redevelopment program condo towers that many of us cannot afford. A Chadwick, Martin Bailey-Arnold Worldwide study of one thousand Boomers (reported in the February 2007 Quirks Marketing Research*) discovered that in our highly segmented group, only 26% are primarily classified as the materialistic “Status Seekers” more likely targets for these high amenity communities. Instead will they preserve property tax breaks for city Boomer homeowners? Will they develop new creative tax incentives, mortgage financing packages and grants for new and refurbished affordable central city senior-only rental complexes—for less well-off Boomers and middle class Boomers–with nearby transit and retail amenities as in the 1960’s.

When I look around New Haven for more affordable options, none will work for me as a non-driver. Connecticut central city government-run lower income senior income/asset-limited housing now includes disabled people, some of whom are drug addicts not in recovery. One of my grandmother’s friends was attacked in her lower income senior apartment by such a neighbor. All middle class senior affordable housing built with government tax incentives requires long walks or bus rides to pharmacies and supermarkets.

Putting all these worries about my future aside, as one of the “usual suspects,” I look forward to joining the Sage 1968 reunion among the many that never tried LSD—thank goodness or I could not cope with such problems facing me. However, do not expect me to further describe my classmates with their varied graduate education, professions, family experiences, achievements and political leanings! I do know, however, all will well-understand my report about starting a class web page on MySpace or Facebook.

*Pages 70-71

I am now a market research freelance analytical manager with a July 2007 Marketing Research Association Expert Professional Research Certification. I lobby for transit service and pedestrian safety improvements with a 2002 M.S. in Urban Studies/Planning from Southern CT State University.

The article reprinted here is by Lynne D.Shapiro is: and is Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Subscribe to this Blog

Badges, Networks, Groups, Conferences… yadda, yadda, yadda…

Influencer Networks

Grab the “My Body, My Vote” Badge

Buy Me a Coffee

Like what I write? Found useful info here. Buy me a cup of coffee (organic, fair trade) to say thank you!

About Me

I have written and published many blogs over the last 15 years on the topics of Later Born Baby Boomers, Peace & Justice Activism, Virtual Worlds, Gene Stratton-Porter, and Medical Child Abuse. I love research, information and the quest for knowledge. I'm an anthropologist by training, and a freelance content creator by vocation. I love things that make sense, could be, and might be so I enjoy good speculative fiction along the lines of Cory Doctorow and TV shows like Dr. Who and Orphan Black.